While the beta only allows you to explore the game’s first act, it’s clear that Diablo 4 will encourage more exploration than Diablo 2 and even Diablo 3. Instead of being ferried from location to location, players have more agency over where they go and what they do. Instead of the randomly-generated levels found in some old Diablo games, Diablo 4‘s world is as sprawling as it is nonlinear. Speaking of the world, the game’s level design is, for the most part, an evolution of the dungeon-crawler genre. The world of Diablo 4 once again feels as if it’s barely hanging on, and every level and enemy helps get that feeling across.

While Diablo 3 took a break from that aesthetic (at least until the Reaper of Souls expansion), Diablo 4 has gleefully returned to it, albeit with slightly stylized results. The franchise started as a gothic grimdark fantasy where the world feels as if it’s on the brink of the apocalypse, and fans quickly fell in love with that look. It kept tripping over the need to drag out and reuse some arcane piece of its own lore and then explain to you why you should care about it again, or introducing new characters who were just plot vehicles with too much screen time.Īdventure mode is far and away the best thing to happen to the game.Diablo 4’s World Is Dark, Massive, and Filled With Adventuresįirst off, I have to congratulate Diablo 4‘s artists. It gave you little flavorful cutscenes between chapters that were evocative enough to be cool, then basically said “go out there and murder the world come back when you find this fuckin statuette or whatever.” Diablo 3 could not get out of its own way.

I mean look, Diablo 2 wasn’t some high watermark in storytelling, but it set the stage and mostly got out of the way. Remember every fucking Blizzard game ever using the same tired “good guy gets corrupted and becomes the bad guy” trope? Well.” “Hey, remember Tristram?! We’re back in Tristram and it sucks! Remember rescuing Deckard from trouble? We’ve got a story beat for you! Remember that mysterious, morally ambiguous angel? You’ll never guess why he’s just an ordinary boring ass dude hangin around town now! Remember act 2 deserts culminating in a showdown in the palace? Well, we kinda just lifted that wholesale.

Hated it, less because of the gameplay, and more because of the cliche-bogged story that was pushed at every turn, and that constantly felt like it was trying to be epic, but instead felt masturbatory.

Diablo 3 gameplay health